EU governmental experts discuss national dementia initiatives

Monday 01 February 2016

On 1 and 2 February, the European Commission convened its group of governmental experts on dementia in Luxembourg. The meeting was attended by government representatives from Bulgaria, Cyprus, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia and the United Kingdom (Department of Health and Scottish Government) who had an exchange on national policy initiatives and developments in the dementia field.

The representatives of the Netherlands and Luxembourg provided an update on the past activities and future plans of their respective priorities with both Slovakia and Malta indicating that their Presidencies would continue to keep dementia on the European agenda.

Tarun Dua from the WHO and Tim Muir from OECD presented their organisations’ plans in developing indicators to better allow benchmarking and comparison of national policies. Geoff Huggins from the Scottish Government presented the plans for the 2nd Joint Action on Dementia which will be officially launched at a kick-off meeting in Luxembourg on 3 and 4 March 2016 and which will bring together national health ministries and academics to identify best practices and run pilot schemes in the following four key areas:

Timely diagnosis and post-diagnostic support

Care coordination and crisis management

Quality of residential care

Dementia-friendly communities.

The second day was dedicated to an exchange on prevention initiatives in the dementia field with Tiia Ngandu presenting the results of the FINGER study, Paul Lincoln the Blackfriars Consensus on dementia prevention and Lara Passante the research projects on prevention supported through FP7, Horizon2020 and the Innovative Medicines Initiative. Jean Georges represented Alzheimer Europe at this meeting.